DAWN, and some thoughts about the space program
Bill Webb
September 27, 2007
I happened to be on top of an I-95 overpass this morning at 7:34 when, looking to the north, I saw a rocket from the Cape speeding eastward. I guessed that it might be the Delta II carrying the DAWN probe to Ceres and Vesta, and a check of the DAWN page at nasa.gov proved me right.
In looking at the paragraph above, I can only feel awe. What a matter-of-fact, ordinary pair of sentences to describe such an incredibly extraordinary event! A group of hyper-intelligent apes, who only discovered how to grow their own food about 10,000 years ago, have banded together and built a machine that will travel more than a billion miles away from their home to investigate the origins of not only their own planet, but the entire Solar System.
To give you younger readers an idea of how rapidly these changes occurred, about fifty-six years ago, as a bright-eyed seven-year-old unskilled in understanding his peers, I made the mistake of letting some schoolmates know that I believed someday men would fly to the Moon. Until I left that school three years later, I was known — derisively — as “Space Man.” The year after I left, the Soviets launched Sputnik. Twelve years later, two men walked on the Moon’s surface for the first time.
What is amazing, and a tribute to the perfidy of leaders who would rather spend money than make progress, is that there were no men on that rocket this morning. One can argue that robots do it better, cheaper, and that you don’t have to worry about getting them back — except that no man has walked on the Moon for more than thirty years, either, and damned few robots.
The only truly useful thing to come out of the space program in the past three decades was the Hubble Telescope, which has advanced cosmology by leaps and bounds — but not space technology. The Space Shuttle was needed to get it there but, despite all the fuss and show, it is simply a clumsy, high-speed glider built — again — with thirty-year-old technology. The Delta lifter that took DAWN into low orbit this morning is old stuff, too.
The fact is, we haven’t had a breakthrough in space technology per se since the first shuttle flew. The hyper-apes who went from hunter-gatherers to Space Men in 500 generations are just standing around scratching their — butts, and as usual, the politicians are talkin’ th’ talk and dancing their usual sidestep while their buddies rake in the shekels, but nobody’s walkin’ th’ walk.
In looking at the paragraph above, I can only feel awe. What a matter-of-fact, ordinary pair of sentences to describe such an incredibly extraordinary event! A group of hyper-intelligent apes, who only discovered how to grow their own food about 10,000 years ago, have banded together and built a machine that will travel more than a billion miles away from their home to investigate the origins of not only their own planet, but the entire Solar System.
To give you younger readers an idea of how rapidly these changes occurred, about fifty-six years ago, as a bright-eyed seven-year-old unskilled in understanding his peers, I made the mistake of letting some schoolmates know that I believed someday men would fly to the Moon. Until I left that school three years later, I was known — derisively — as “Space Man.” The year after I left, the Soviets launched Sputnik. Twelve years later, two men walked on the Moon’s surface for the first time.
What is amazing, and a tribute to the perfidy of leaders who would rather spend money than make progress, is that there were no men on that rocket this morning. One can argue that robots do it better, cheaper, and that you don’t have to worry about getting them back — except that no man has walked on the Moon for more than thirty years, either, and damned few robots.
The only truly useful thing to come out of the space program in the past three decades was the Hubble Telescope, which has advanced cosmology by leaps and bounds — but not space technology. The Space Shuttle was needed to get it there but, despite all the fuss and show, it is simply a clumsy, high-speed glider built — again — with thirty-year-old technology. The Delta lifter that took DAWN into low orbit this morning is old stuff, too.
The fact is, we haven’t had a breakthrough in space technology per se since the first shuttle flew. The hyper-apes who went from hunter-gatherers to Space Men in 500 generations are just standing around scratching their — butts, and as usual, the politicians are talkin’ th’ talk and dancing their usual sidestep while their buddies rake in the shekels, but nobody’s walkin’ th’ walk.
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